Friday, November 8, 2013

Pick a review of Cults , any review, and you’ll find
references to Girl Groups and walls of sound. Umm…no. Comments like that tell
me that the reviewer has given only a cursory listen to, oh, fifteen second
clips on Last FM. The craft (let’s not say art please) of music crit has taken
a nose dive. A few clicks avails a cursory listen to any music, any artist. Since
there’s no longer any real time invested in digging through brick and mortar
stores or mail ordering rare B-sides from obscure European P.O. boxes, it’s become simple -- almost de rigueur -- to flit
from song to song, site to site. It’s the modern equivalent of channel surfing.
If you don’t like the first half minute of a song or --even worse-- you think
you know just where it’s heading from hearing a brief intro, you may as well
stick to posting reviews at bastions of critical expertise, like maybe Amazon.

Sure there’s a relation to the Girl Group sound but it’s the same influence
that informed the Phil Spectors and Shadow Mortons: post-fifties pop when only
a few shredded vestiges of doo wop lingered. Cults could just as easily garner
comparison to ABBA, The Jesus & Mary Chain and, sadly, a little bit of
Fleetwood Mac. I realize it’s hip to love Fleetwood Mac nowadays but please
remember that -- to quote John Huston in the
Polanski classic Chinatown-- “Politicians,
ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

It may sound like I’m working up to a slag on Cults.
Far from it. From Manhattan (not
Brooklyn as they are quick to point out) Madeline Follin and Brian Oblivion might
have gathered their influences purposefully but I’m thinking it’s more a sort
of music culture osmosis. For example, Molly Hamilton of Widowspeak says she’d never heard Mazzy Star
until every music critic hauled out that (quite accurate) comparison.

With two releases under their belts, Cults’ music has
an interesting range even within a somewhat narrow confine. There’s a galloping pop sound heading towards
Raveonettes territory in “Abducted”. “Bad Things” sounds like stripped down ABBA.
An up-to-date Little Peggy March on a psychoanalyst’s couch in “You Know What IMean” or an echo of The pre-hit Shirelles with “Go Outside”. In “High Road”
there’s even a little smooth funk, like
Gamble & Huff mellowed into an opiated pre-Madonna on the dancefloor. What
I’m getting at with all these odd comparisons is that we listeners can read any
of our influences into what we hear. If it’s a happy
comparison so much the better, the hell with the critics (your narrator
included).

Much of Cults’ work is simultaneously bass heavy and
treble heavy. I’m curious if the band can reproduce its heavily-processed sound
faithfully onstage but since the music industry has been steadily heading away
from actual musical instruments towards sample-driven touch-of -a-button
production, I’m betting there will be
few if any sonic issues.

Opening is Mood Rings whose “Year of Dreams” evokes a
Girl Group lonelyhearts sound far more than any Cults composition. They also head straight for the gut with
driving static reverb in songs like “Washer”, bookended by breathy and languid
shoegaze. Also on the bill, SAACO goes for a fuller sound, sort of ambient dark
psych with a big backbeat.